Fighting fires has always been risky, but to combat fires in a forest, surrounded by thousands of acres of combustible fuel for the blaze, is another thing entirely. Wildfires are really an unpredictable force by nature. Wildfires can leap across highways, create their own winds and can move at speeds faster than a human can run.
To sustain itself, a fire needs three elements, heat-oxygen-fuel. Missing any one of these elements, a fire will extinguish itself. Air contains 21% oxygen typically. It is a physical principle that a combustion process cannot sustain a fire if the percentage of oxygen present in the air is less than 11%. Fire extinguishers are made to break one or more of the three elements by smothering the oxygen or coating a layer of powder or foam on fire or cool down the combustible fuel.
However, in a wide open, a wildfire most often occurs in hot and dry summer season where water is difficult to obtain. A Fire truck often cannot reach its target in the wilderness and therefore any fire extinguishers a fire truck renders are useless. Left untreated, the wildfire continuous to burn until all combustible fuel exhausted.
Aerial bombardment with water and fire retardant are therefore often called in to fight a wildfire. It is a very dangerous operation since there are no air traffic controllers to guide pilots and thick smoke fills the skies and drastically reduces their visibility.
On the other hand, sending ground base fire fighters close to a wilderness target seems a suicide mission in most of wildfires. This invention offers a more advanced solution to deal with wildfires and conventionally hard to reach fires.